Muir’s main task is to maintain the status quo

On the face of it, Bernard Muir’s hiring as Stanford athletic director seems smart. He’s bright, engaging and experienced in not only the ways of university athletic administations but also the NCAA.

Some Stanford people may be put off that he hadn’t previously worked for Stanford, as had some other possible choices like WCC commissioner Jamie Zaninovich and UC Irvine AD Mike Izzi. For that matter, many longtime Stanford insiders were put off that Bob Bowlsby didn’t reach out more to the local community. They thought he was too stiff and too slow to pull the trigger on vigorous marketing for the football team, which had trouble selling out until Andrew Luck’s final season.

I’d say Bowlsby did an extraordinary job overall. Remember, he had been criticized at Iowa for not hiring Bob Stoops, a former Iowa player, as football coach. Stoops then turned Oklahoma around.

At Stanford, Bowlsby helped restore a moribund football program with the pivotal hire of Jim Harbaugh and followed that with what so far has been another great choice in David Shaw. The jury is still out on Johnny Dawkins, but if his great junior class comes through, the basketball team should have a fine season.

There has been considerable carping at Delaware over Muir, but it seems to me any AD in his situation would get some criticism.

A former Delaware track athlete, Tom Rogers, tells me Muir had said in a 2011 radio interview that “no one wants to come to a university and cut an athletic program” and “my goal is to see more athletes in uniform at UD.” Then he dropped men’s track and field program, a fixture at the school for a century. Says Rogers, “If one is to take him at his word, he was a complete failure on those counts.”

According to Rogers, the Delaware athletic department used to be run “as a family of sorts,” but under Muir it was strictly a business. Rogers says: “My advice to all non-revenue athletes at Stanford: Watch your back!”

We’re quite familiar in the Bay Area with the potential crises brought on by state budget cuts. Cal brought several sports to the brink of extinction last year before they were rescued. I assume Muir faced similar financial constraints at Delaware.

Other people at Delaware complained when football season-ticket prices were linked to donations. The dreaded personal seat licenses reared their ugly head, and Delaware, as Stanford did, started charging for football parking.

Again, all of this is a familiar refrain on the West Coast, from Cal and many other universities. Stanford, of course, has one of the largest endowments in the country and doesn’t the same deep financial problems that many state institutions have.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be problems, especially if the economic crisis persists or worsens. But it will take at least a few years before we see in which direction Muir takes the Cardinal.

He’ll immediately have to replace Lea Maurer in women’s swimming and Edrick Floreal as director of track and field. But he takes over an athletic department that, from top to bottom, is the best in the country. If he can roughly maintain the status quo, particularly in football, he will be a rousing success.